President* Biden claimed today that ‘no amendment to the Constitution is absolute’.
The idea that no rights are absolute is demonstrably wrong, as is the dumb example that he relied on to illustrate it. But we can ignore that for the moment.
I say we take him at his word — not because he’s right, but because he, and others like him, will never understand just how wrong he is until he finds himself on the opposing side of a similarly ridiculous claim.
Which is why legislators who support gun rights should start introducing bills to make Protestant Christianity the official religion of the United States, or the official religion of various states.
Why would they do that? Not because they want it to happen, but because it would engender a certain kind of conversation, which we desperately need to have. That conversation would go something like this:
A: If no rights are absolute, then Congress can, by statute, make Protestant Christianity the official religion of the United States.
B: B-b-b-but they can’t do that!
A: Why not?
B: It would be unconstitutional! It would violate the First Amendment!
A: But the president just said that rights aren’t absolute. And banning certain religions wouldn’t ‘impinge on’ the First Amendment any more than banning AR-15s would ‘impinge on’ the Second Amendment.
B: They could try, I guess, but the Supreme Court would never go for it.
A: Are you sure about that? And what if they did go for it? Do you really believe that five out of nine political appointees can completely rewrite any part of the Constitution if they feel so inclined? Because that’s the argument you’re making — that the Constitution literally says any damn thing that a majority of the Supreme Court says it does.
B: Uhhh…
Alan Dershowitz — no friend of gun rights — once said:
Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.
Or as the old saying goes: Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it.
The thing is, it’s simply not enough to try to explain to people — as Carlson Tucker does here — why gun control laws are both unconstitutional and ungrounded in reality. The people who need to hear those arguments aren’t interested in listening to them.
It’s almost a law of nature that people are unconvinced by arguments that they don’t come up with on their own. Forcing legislators to hold hearings and vote on bills that are unfeasible in exactly the same ways as gun control bills would force them to construct, and therefore give them the opportunity to understand, such arguments.
If you have kids, you know that it’s often the case that a single object lesson — a demonstration of how it feels to be wronged in some way — can accomplish what untold amounts of explanation have failed to do. ‘Did you like that? No? Well, other people feel like that when you do it to them.’
Should we have to treat progressives like children, substituting visceral demonstrations for reasoned explanations? In a perfect world, no. But in the world they’ve been working so hard to create, absolutely.
